Sketch-comedy troupes are essentially rock bands that deal in jokes instead of songs—so it follows that the most skilled practitioners of the form have aligned with key musical movements over the years. The absurdist vignettes of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” bore the influence of early-‘70s madcap psychedelia and byzantine prog-rock. The wild contrast between The Kids in the Hall’s clean-cut appearances and their outrageous gender-bending provocation embodied the buttoned-down, pent-up nature of college rock’s golden age. In the first half of ‘90s, “In Living Color” brought hip-hop culture to prime time, packaging its skits in spray-paint splashes, breakbeats, and B-girl chorus lines. And if the sly humour and sardonic alterna-culture commentaries of a Pavement song could be channeled into a comedy program, the result would resemble something like “Mr. Show”.

Founded by David Cross and Bob Odenkirk, ”Mr. Show” debuted on HBO in November 1995 and yielded meager ratings over the course of its 30-episode, four-season run. Its impact, however, continues to reverberate across contemporary pop culture—and not just through obvious sketch-com successors like “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” and “The Birthday Boys”. Cross is a prolific character and voice actor whose credits include everything from “Arrested Development” to the Alvin and the Chipmunks movies; Odenkirk has parlayed a scene-stealing supporting role on “Breaking Bad” into his own flagship AMC series, “Better Call Saul”. And if you turn on your TV right now, it won’t be long until you encounter a member of the show’s extended supporting cast, be it in major motion pictures (Sarah Silverman, Jack Black), or on “24” (Mary Lynn Rajskub), “30 Rock” (Scott Adsit), “Community” (Dino Stamatopoulos), “New Girl” (Brian Posehn), “Comedy Bang Bang” (Scott Aukerman), “@midnight” (Paul F. Tompkins), and even “SpongeBob Square Pants” (voiced by Tom Kenny).

But “Mr. Show”’s legacy amounts to so much more than just a career springboard. Its cult endures over generations because, for the most part, it avoided the very things that date so much sketch comedy: celebrity impersonations, faddish catchphrases, and recurring one-note characters. Each overstuffed episode bears both the chaotic, collage-like quality of a cherished mixtape and the fluidity of a classic concept album, stitching its segments together in seamless, suite-like fashion with overarching themes and ribbon-tying reprises. And its merciless attacks on corporate greed, media trend spotting, and inane advertising have only become more trenchant as those forces have become increasingly pervasive and desperate. To wit, couponing is now a form of entertainment. Mustard-mayonnaise is now a thing. And today’s hipsters really do dress like old people.

But while their cultural targets were always shifting, Cross and Odenkirk’s obvious music fandom—and their indie rock-schooled contempt for pop-star posturing—served as the program’s most reliable source of comedic fodder. As Cross explains to me, his interests in underground music and stand-up blossomed in tandem, and his ascent from open-mic amateur to cable-TV comedy kingpin ran parallel to American indie rock’s mainstream incursion over the course of the ‘80s and ‘90s.

“I was really lucky in that, when I started doing stand-up in Atlanta in the early ‘80s, the whole Athens scene was happening,” he says over the phone from L.A. during his morning commute to work. (At the time, he was not able to divulge the exact nature of that work, though I can now safely assume it had to do with Cross and Odenkirk’s since-announced upcoming reunion series for Netflix, “With Bob and David”.) “Then, when I moved to Boston a few years later, that scene started to really break as well. So I had all this great, new, interesting music around me wherever I went. A lot of comedians worked with bands, because they were your friends—comedy shows would have bands, bands would have comedy. That was constant.

After moving to L.A. to work on “The Ben Stiller Show” in the early ‘90s, he fell in with a new set of musicians—including Tool’s Maynard James Keenan, Grant Lee Buffalo, Mark Oliver Everett of the Eels, Aimee Mann, and Michael Penn—as all of their careers started to rise. “Mr. Show”’s connections to the alt-rock world went beyond the odd Maynard cameo, though. Cross and Odenkirk’s regular gig-going also lead to friendships with acts like Pavement, Cat Power, and Yo La Tengo, and the “Mr. Show” crew even starred in YLT’s eternally awesome “Sugarcube” video. That sort of cross-pollination prefigured an indie-rock/comedy conversation that’s only become more pronounced over the past two decades, through Tom Scharpling and Jon Wurster’s music-nerd satire on “The Best Show”, Sub Pop’s now-regular signings of comedians (Cross included), and punks-turned-pranksters Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein’s hipster-baiting “Portlandia”.

On the eve of “Mr. Show”’s 20th anniversary, I spoke to Cross about the inspirations behind some of the program’s greatest music-themed sketches, and how their cabal of made-up musicians have directly influenced—or anticipated—real ones.

Titannica

Synopsis: A popular thrash band visits their #1 fan, Adam, in the hospital following an attempted suicide inspired by one of their songs. The encounter leaves the band so traumatized, they write a follow-up single to encourage Adam to finish the job.

Pitchfork: Metalheads are a recurring presence throughout “Mr. Show”—was that a reflection of what you were seeing around you when you moved to L.A.?

David Cross: Yeah, hair metal was big here, but that was more about pop culture in the United States in general, and not simply what we were seeing on Sunset Boulevard. It was the loudest and noisiest style of music, and it was driving MTV at the time. It didn’t matter if you were in L.A. or Boulder, Colorado or Grand Rapids, Michigan—you’re going to see hair-metal guys.

Pitchfork: As a punk kid, were you picked on by metal dudes?

DC: Not really. I’m a little old for that, my era was pre-metal. So the bullying I got… well, you can use your imagination: I was a poor Jewish kid with thick glasses and a big fro living in suburban Atlanta, which was very Baptist and rural back then. So it was mostly jocks and guys who were hanging out listening to Skynyrd, AC/DC, and Zeppelin picking on me.

Pitchfork: The song Titannica performs at the end of this bit is subtitled “Adam’s Song”, which became the name of a Blink 182 song—ironically, their first “serious” single, about an actual fan suicide.

Pootie T and Wolfgang Amadeus Thelonius von Funkenmeister the 19th and Three Quarters—aka Three Times One Minus One—are a white R&B duo dripping with so much shameless cultural appropriation, their songs don’t even require actual lyrics.

DC: I went to a school of the arts when I was 15 in Atlanta, in 1980, and the people there were truly talented—like, they blew me away, they were so fucking good. But almost every person who sang did that thing you’d see on “The Voice”. That’s been around for a while. It’s very churchy. You see it sometimes when people sing “The Star Spangled Banner” before sporting events: “Oh so proudly we haaaaaiiiiiillllllll.” Shit like that.

Smoosh

An MTV-style interview doubles as a therapy session for a surly Britpop band.

Pitchfork: Were you a fan of Oasis?

DC: Slightly, but Bob was fucking obsessed. He fucking loved them. He loved their attitude, too. He would just gobble up anything Oasis-related: He loved the music, he loved the band, he loved reading their interviews, and especially loved hearing about the brotherly dysfunction within the band. Any Q magazine or NME that came out with Oasis in it, he would buy it. And while the Smoosh thing was evocative of Oasis—when you watch it, Bob is actually doing more of a John Lydon type of guy.

Wyckyd Sceptre

A hair-metal act is embroiled in a scandal when a videotape leaks showing band members having sex—with each other.

Pitchfork: This was inspired by the Tommy Lee/Pamela Anderson sex tape that was making the rounds then. But you gave it a twist...

DC: I was driving cross-country with my friend Mark Rivers, who did the theme song for “Mr. Show”, when he was moving to L.A., and we just riffed on this idea about the Pam and Tommy tape: What if it was actually Tommy Lee and Vince Neil on the tape, and they had no idea that what they were doing was gay? “Just having a good time, bro!”

DC: I met those guys at this bar we used to go to all the time in New York, 7B, and they were kind of shy, and one of them came over with a girlfriend and said, “My friends want to meet you, they’re in a band,” and I was like, “Sure.” So we ended up hanging out, talking, and getting high, and they asked me if it was cool if they could call it the Wyckyd Sceptre tour. They became a big deal really quickly, and I think they had just come out with their first album, so I knew the name and the hype, but I don’t think I had heard the CD. It was all just happening—like, that week.

The Fad Three

A documentary retrospective of the British pop phenomenon that pre-dated the Beatles, but never quite achieved the same status—because they weren’t actually a band, but rather three mop-topped guys in suits who simply photographed well.

Pitchfork: It’s obvious from watching this that you’re Beatles fans, but their history presents a lot of opportunities for parody.

DC: That was not a statement in any way on the Beatles at all. I think it was [Bob’s brother and “Mr. Show” writer] Bill Odenkirk who had this idea of people being famous just for their pictures.

Pitchfork: It really anticipates this modern era of celebrities who are famous for being famous, and the idea that you don’t really have to do anything to become a star.

DC: That was not the reason for the piece, but if you see that, God bless you.

DC: Well, he was really flogging his son with that song [“Tears in Heaven”]! It was a huge hit, and everyone wanted to hear it, and he just kept playing it. It was on his Unplugged, his Greatest Hits... at some point, you lose me, and the song just doesn’t have the same resonance anymore. We were exploring the idea of exploiting death.